Manager or Miscreant? The Strange Career of Gimillu of Uruk

By: Michael Kozuh

From around 540 to 520 BC cuneiform texts from the Eanna of Uruk, a temple in southern Babylonia, detail the unusual activities of a man named Gimillu, son of Innin-shuma-ibni. Those activities, long known to researchers, include stealing temple’s sheep, fleeing from temple authorities, and continually standing in front of temple tribunals. Recently, Michael Jursa published a text that even fingers Gimillu in an assassination plot.

Other texts, though, show Gimillu in positions of authority. He bore an official, if unique, title in the temple.  He tracked down and arrested cattle rustlers and other temple thieves. And, perhaps most interestingly, he communicated directly with royal authorities in Babylon.

Occam’s razor makes Gimillu a corrupt official—one who, given authority of some sort in the temple, abused his position for personal gain. This seems true in a general sense, but we do not know enough about Babylonian Realpolitik to delve much deeper. I am not sure we ever will. Among other impediments, Gimillu is one of the very few public officials—in the entire cuneiform record—for whom we have records of corruption as it happened. His case presents questions we are simply not used to answering.

I take up Gimillu’s case anew in my recent book The Sacrificial Economy: Assessors, Contractors, and Thieves in the Management of Sacrificial Sheep at the Eanna Temple of Uruk (ca. 625–520 B.C.).  As scholars have long noted, Gimillu gained prominence just as Cyrus overthrew Nabonidus and took the Babylonian kingship. Like all empires, Cyrus’ recently established administration wanted to know more about the wealth of its subjects; like all established institutions under foreign occupation, the Eanna temple had little reason to divulge that information outright. As I see it, the new imperial administration at Babylon used Gimillu to bridge that gap. Not quite a temple official, but rather an associate with ties to the Eanna’s establishment, Gimillu worked for the crown to ascertain the animals under the control of the Eanna’s contractors, to police the Eanna’s collection system, and to get some sense of how the temple’s booking process worked.

This was real information, and real wealth. Investigating the records, I found that the temple had 70,000 to 90,000 sheep under the control of its livestock contractors, who delivered around 5000 sacrificial lambs and 40 tons of wool to the temple in any given year. As others have shown, the temple then sold that wool to the crown in substantial bulk quantities for cash, which the temple then used to fund its operations. The Eanna’s animal economy operated at a scope and size with few parallels in the ancient world.

In fact, we know crown officials tried to get at this information different ways. A series of Eanna texts relate orders from the royal administration demanding the records of animal inspections be sent to Babylon or which mention royal officials poking around in the Eanna’s livestock business in various ways. Many of those same texts show high-level temple officials deflecting Babylon’s inquiries. In one, an Eanna official states to a royal messenger that it is the wrong time of year for animal inspections; in another, the temple agrees to bring its contractors in to swear that they are not hiding any animals. In a third, the temple obliges its contractors to go to Babylon themselves.

Two texts actually note that temple authorities tried to give Gimillu information on the temple’s livestock operations. In the first, the text spells out that temple authorities literally tried to hand Gimillu records of the balances of its livestock contractors. The second is difficult to understand but seems to relate an instance in which temple authorities tasked Gimillu with assessing the temple’s animal wealth. Both texts then mention that, when confronted by temple officials, Gimillu ran away. The first text adds that not only did Gimillu flee, he also stated that he refused to meet with temple authorities for seven months – even if, it claims he said, they sent ten men to bring him in!

These snapshots are, in a word, unusual if not simply bizarre. Boiling it down, I think we see three things at work—first, interest from Babylon in records of the Eanna’s animal wealth; second, equivocation on the part of temple officials in divulging this information to Babylon; and, finally, local records stating that temple officialdom tried to give the proper information to Gimillu but he would not accept it. In fact, he literally ran away from it. Twice.

Ultimately, I argue that this reflects political back-and-forth over the records themselves. Gimillu knew that his high-level standing at the Eanna depended upon his ability to relate information back to Babylon. Once Babylon had official records of that information, Gimillu’s usefulness to the crown would diminish. So he sat on the records. Temple authorities, certainly not eager to share information but also forced to come to terms with the new imperial administration, made sure to officially document that Gimillu rejected the records they tried to give to him. If the crown complained about the speed of their compliance, temple officials wanted the finger pointed at Babylon’s man, Gimillu.

While all this was happening, Gimillu stole animals. By my count, the temple accused Gimillu of stealing five cows and thirteen sheep over fifteen years. He stole them in his capacity as temple official—contractors turned animals over to him assuming they were giving them to the temple. Instead, Gimillu kept them for himself. It was larceny and embezzlement, but not of epic proportions. Temple authorities regularly dealt with the theft and mismanagement of animals; at times contractors took off with whole herds. Of more interest is the fact that authorities meticulously documented each time they hauled Gimillu in front of a tribunal for another animal theft.

Obvious questions suggest themselves: How could he retain his position in view of his many misdeeds? And why even bother documenting his petty thefts for fifteen years? Here too I would circle back to his royal connections. I think temple administrators tracked Gimillu’s misdeeds because, given his royal support, they had no other way to remove him. By generating a detailed set of trial records, they had real proof of his corruption to bring before imperial administrators. I imagine that imperial satraps and their staffs often regarded grumblings about a local agent as a sign of his effectiveness. They probably dealt with accusations of theft or gossip about local power abuses all the time. But were administrators in Babylon to show real interest in the Eanna’s affairs, actual documentation of Gimillu’s decades-long corruption, witnessed by generations of the temple’s elite, might have carried weight in an appeal to remove him.

Clearly Gimillu knew how to play the game—his career outlasted those of five temple administrators and three of the Eanna’s royal representatives. Indeed after his livestock ventures Gimillu moved over to land management, were he became one of the Eanna’s large-scale agricultural contractors.

During that time, however, Gimillu was accused of plotting to assassinate the Eanna’s royal representative. We know this because the temple documented the accusation with a legal text. We will never know whether the accusation had merit, which is ultimately irrelevant. Politically ambitious people used assassination and false accusations of assassination plotting to remove rivals. Here, for the same reasons spelled about above, the temple made sure to register the accusation in a text. Perhaps this was finally enough for Babylon to remove its bad seed.

I see Gimillu as a local collaborator with the Persian regime. This brought him some wealth and power, but also drew suspicion from the local authorities. The crown tasked him with bringing order to the chaotic livestock operations of the Eanna, to pass information back to the crown, and to carry out royal prerogatives on the ground. He then abused his power—stole animals, sat on information that compromised his position, and generally operated in such a way that created local animosity. Temple authorities, unable to remove him on account of his connections, instead started a file. They meticulously documented his crimes, from petty theft to assassination plotting, in the hope of one day using them against him in Babylon. We do not know whether that day ever came. But a suggestion that, in effect, temple authorities cleaned out their records (and thus preserved the Eanna archive for us today) on account of l’affaire Gimillu suggests it might have.

Michael Kozuh is Associate Professor of History at Auburn University.